Lock's Quest Multiplayer Hands-on

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We go head to head with 5th Cell's finest.

By Mark Bozon

Recently, IGN had a chance to meet up and chill with the talented, decently good looking (not quite as good as a few of us, mind you) people over at 5th Cell. The team previously responsible for the "Why's this play better than a kids game should?" kids game, Drawn to Life, just now finished work on its second DS project in as many years, with Lock's Quest. We've been covering the game for a long while -- if you didn't hear about it from us first, you heard it from someone who did -- and we've now got a final copy in hand, and also had a chance to step onto the battlefield and rip it up with co-founder and creative director of 5th Cell, Jeremiah Slaczka.

We lost many a men on that battlefield, but lived to report.

The core Lock's Quest experience (as we hope you already know by now) is a mix between real-time strategy, point and click combat, and construction sequences that feel like one part Age of Empires, and one part Rampart. With the single player mode, you'll be primarily defensive throughout the entire experience. In multiplayer though, it's all about going head to head with another player locally, and balancing offense and defense to win the day.

Here's how it works: At the start of a match, the host of the game selects which level the opponents will fight on, and a few simple options. Starting source level (your building and character deployment cash) and time limit are both available for tweaking, as is the actual amount of day s you want to fight. After that, each player is put on the playfield and start spending source on multiple waves of baddies to send out to the other.

The main Clockwork grunts are free to use, but as you start to go with magic casters or heavier units, you'll need to pay. Each wave can be custom-made, so its as important to select what units you'll bring to the fight as it is to decide when to send them. You can try starting out with two waves of weaker, free, grunts, and then hit them later with harder units after the player will be overwhelmed, or you can vary things up in each wave, making sure that one perfect turret (certain characters are weak against certain structures) won't dominate a whole wave of soldiers instantly. After creating the waves, you can actually select from a few pre-determined AI routes for each group to take, so if you know your opponent likes to spread things out evenly across the map -- or if they play aggressive or defensive with Lock himself on the field -- you can decide where to send the groups to counter their strategy.

Building happens next, and it's pretty straightforward, though we were startled to see so many options in there. Since multiplayer needs to be an even playing field, 5TH CELL opted to make it a no-holds-barred match, allowing for any structure or enemy in the game. That means every wall, turret, gadget, and building material is available, and prices range from a few hundred source to well into the thousands. If you aren't careful, you can easily blow your source budget on just a few towers. Building time soon expires, and it's on to the fight.

Fighting is exactly as you'd expect it to be from the Lock's Quest design. Run around with Lock to do direct combat, use any of his unlocked skills (which he has all of, since it's again a free mode with all content available) to decimate enemies, play offensively on the front lines, or hang back and patrol your towers to make sure the enemy team doesn't break through. Repairing takes source, but killing enemy attackers rewards you with more, so balance is a must. As an added aspect of multiplayer, doing Lock's tap-combos (tapping the micro-game "1, 2, 3, 4, 5" combos on the bottom of the screen while he fights) will send your team much-needed stat buffers, including stronger attack, speed, or defense.

Overall the battles were a blast, but it was pretty obvious that the best vs. mode players are going to be the ones that master the single player mode first, or put in a lot of time in multiplayer. We played for a few fights, and didn't scratch the surface of strategy, items, towers, special attacks, or strategy that we know was there -- we knew, quite frankly, because our good friend Miah was kicking the crap out of us while carrying on a casual conversation about the game -- so we can't wait to play more of the multiplayer, and take what we learn there back into the main game to kick the tar out of a few more Clockworks. It's a shame that the mode doesn't have online or some kind of team co-op mode for multiplayer, but if Lock's Quest gets a sequel, rest assured that we'll have our wish list ready to go, and co-op story mode, team multiplayer, and online are all on it. On its own, two player battle mode is an awesome added mode to an otherwise single player, story-driven though, and it's more than enough of a reason to convince friends to pick up Lock's Quest and get into the game with you when it releases. We could see the DS community really getting into the strategy of vs. Lock's Quest; it's an awesome addition to an already impressive package.